"Google announced an update to its Google Play mobile app on Android - its online store for apps, music, books, magazines, movies and TV shows - today, one that is aimed at cleaning up the UI and optimizing it for different device types. It's a model of clarity and discoverability, not to mention scalability, features that are sorely lacking in Microsoft's Windows Store." As a Surface RT owner, I couldn't agree more with Paul Thurrott.

However, I can't say the Google Play store appeals much more. Two thirds of the screen is allotted to advertising. There's so much going on that if I was going there for something particular, I'd find it really hard to focus on the task.

Well, I think that's the point - they're aiming to fix that.

That said, it's pretty much only the initial screen that does that. After that you go into "music" or "apps" or etc and there's almost none of that, it's very simple, easy, and elegant. (Speaking from using both N1 with latest Play Store and ASUS Transformer Infinity with Play Store.)

I can also understand that it's difficult to manage such a large number of items, but it still surprises me that there's no better way than freetext search for finding an application that fits specific criteria (although Google Play does improve as you go deeper into the process).

Any kind of search is only as good as the information entered about the products, which drives me nuts as even the same vendor may have different information at different places the same product is sold - which makes it really, really hard to make comparisons. Or even the same vendor having the same information laid out differently at only one place they have multiple products, so again it's hard to compare the several different products they may have.

Having something other than free-text search might make an improvement, but only to the degree that (i) a seller enables different categories/etc to be selected, the vendor specifies which categories/etc are applicable to each item they are providing the seller, and (iii) the person entering the device takes the time to properly select the categories/etc. So, that won't likely be a very workable solution any time soon.